With the internet so ingrained into every aspect of our work and personal lives, our brains are struggling to keep up. Many of us are used to being online 24/7 and feel empty when we unplug. We need to have constant access to our followers, social media, and apps to feel like we belong.
It's no surprise that our growing dependence on this revolutionary technology is changing our thinking, especially for the Gen-Z population who grew up without realizing that there was an alternative world in front of them.
We are often unaware of the external forces that influence us internally because they usually occur at a subconscious level. The same can be said for the technologies that have been assimilated into our lives, from television to the World Wide Web. Here are some of the major ways the Internet has transformed our minds behind the scenes.
1) Enhancement of brain functions
Surfing the Internet is much more complex than reading books, as the process involves searching for what we want in search engines and jumping from one hyperlink to another. For this reason, when middle-aged and older participants were instructed to search the Internet on specific topics assigned by researchers, the brain activity of those who used the Internet was found to be deeper than that of those who rarely or never used it.
The second brain scan was conducted two weeks later after the participants were asked to do an internet search for an hour every day for seven days. Surprisingly, the inexperienced internet users now showed brain activity that was similar to that seen among participants who were already familiar with the internet.
The study proves that internet searching alone has the power to rewire our brains. The regions of the brain responsible for short-term memory and decision-making were activated during a second brain scan, indicating that internet use enhanced these specific brain functions.
If such a short period of learning online is all it takes to improve our cognitive abilities, just imagine how much more advanced our minds are after years of exposure. And not just to search engines like Google, but also to social media and the wide range of interactive content available online. The exponential growth of user-generated content on the Internet over the past decade is certain proof that we are becoming more creative people.
2) Increase creative potential
The Internet has given us all a voice in cyberspace and the ability to easily communicate with others, to the extent that many of us compete with each other to be heard. With Facebook status updates, comments and subscriptions, uploading photos and videos, checking in to places, and more, we seem to have no compunctions about our privacy, despite the privacy risks they bring.
The good news is that because we are hungry to be popular on social media and the internet in general, we inevitably become motivated to be more creative and original when it comes to what we post online.
There is no denying that our minds become more creative and inspired by watching millions of amazing videos on YouTube, clever quotes on social media pages, Twitter and Facebook, and a bunch of other cool ideas on the web. To come up with all this, the brain generated ideas and drew its inspiration and shared it with other users.
3) Impact on self-esteem
The downside of this newfound creative carousel via the internet is that some of us start to feel insecure about ourselves. We compare our lives to our friends based on what they upload to social media and networks. It is important to remember that these posts do not give an accurate picture of life, as many of them pose online to impress others. The result of such false comparisons is that we become unnecessarily envious of harmless photos of people enjoying themselves, for example, on holiday.
The researchers found that a third of participants felt more negative after viewing their Facebook feed, especially those who only browsed the site and did not send any messages.
It seems that, at least for some of us, our brains have now unhealthily linked our social media involvement to our self-esteem. This is probably why we now hear about how compulsive Facebook use can cause depression and how people become addicted to Facebook. In most of these disorders, the source of the problem stems from perceived social pressure and underlying self-esteem issues.
4) Reduction of attention
With the advent and spread of Internet technology, our ability to sustain attention on one subject has been greatly reduced. Hyperlinks appear everywhere on the Internet, encouraging us to explore websites in a non-linear manner. Long and repeated surfing of the Internet, clicking on one link after another, has conditioned our attention to only briefly scan the contents of each page before moving on to the next.
We often find ourselves searching for another topic that has caught our attention before we have even finished half of what we were originally looking for. In fact, one of the biggest challenges blog owners face is how to keep online readers reading their content.
If you need proof that we're getting impatient (at least online), check out these informative statistics on our attention spans and online behavior. The study found that our average attention span has dropped more than 30% from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013.
On average, office workers check their email inboxes 30 times per hour. It was also found that out of 53,573 web page views, 17% lasted less than 4 seconds, and only 4% lasted more than 10 minutes! Keep that up, and we'll have trouble concentrating on one thing, forcing us to multitask.
5) Encourage multitasking
With our diminished ability to sustain attention on one task, we resort to multitasking, doing more than one thing at a time. My bet is that you’re probably doing something other than reading this article right now: maybe listening to songs, chatting online, checking your Facebook and email inbox in separate tabs — or even surfing other websites.
With the advent of wearable smart devices, our minds have been rewired to only be stimulated when we are performing multiple tasks simultaneously.
While most people perceive multitasking as a more ideal option for saving time, the negative effects appear to be that cognitive abilities actually outweigh productivity. Research has shown that multitasking actually divides our attention, leading to frequent distractions. Only a rare 2% of the population, known as supertaskers, have been found to perform better with multiple workloads.
6) Reprogram memory
In a 2011 study, psychologist Dr. Betsy Sparrow concluded that the World Wide Web now serves as an “external memory storage space, and you are responsible for remembering things.” In a series of four memory experiments, participants were found to tend to think of computer terms like “Yahoo” or “Google” when asked simple questions.
They performed better at recalling trivia information when they thought they couldn't find it on the computer during a retest. When asked to enter the information into the computer and save it in different folders, the participants were actually able to remember the folder locations better than the operators themselves!
This study showed that the Internet has become a form of transitive memory source and has therefore changed the way we remember things. According to one of the researchers in the above-mentioned study in 1985, transient memory refers to how we rely on others who are more knowledgeable about a particular subject to help us remember information.
Thanks to the Internet, we are no longer limited by the capacity of the human brain, we have entrusted our memory to the network so that the rest of the time can be spent on creativity. Search engines such as Google have become a gateway to access any information at any time.
